News Headlines - 26 August 2013

▽BBC News - Syria crisis: UN complains after inspectors fired on

The UN is to complain to the Syrian government and rebels after a convoy of chemical weapons inspectors came under sniper fire. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said he would ask the inspection team in Damascus to register "a strong complaint" so it never happened again.

▽Is the party over for Wikileaks in Australia? - The Independent

When a party which espouses human rights and social justice appears to be in cahoots with gun nuts and neo-fascists, that’s not a good look. When it loses a star candidate two weeks before an election, that’s careless. And when the same party, supposedly synonymous with democracy and transparency, is accused by its own members of secretive decision-making, that could spell electoral oblivion.

▽Snowden got stuck in Russia after Cuba blocked entry: newspaper | Reuters

Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden got stuck in the transit zone of a Moscow airport because Havana said it would not let him fly from Russia to Cuba, a Russian newspaper reported on Monday.

▽Film on Salinger Claims More Books Are Coming - NYTimes.com

Mr. Salinger, who died in 2010 at the age of 91, has been known for a distinguished but scant literary oeuvre that was capped by the enormous success of his 1951 novel, “The Catcher in the Rye.” But a forthcoming documentary and related book, both titled “Salinger,” include detailed assertions that Mr. Salinger instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books — some of them entirely new, some extending past work — in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015.

▽Edinburgh fringe closes with record ticket sales | The Guardian

The Edinburgh fringe festival has claimed another record-busting year for ticket sales, after announcing it had issued nearly 2m tickets for its shows and events. As the fringe drew to a close on Monday, it said that an estimated 1.94m tickets had been sold or issued over the past 25 days. This was 5% more than last year's festival, which was hit by lower demand as it clashed with the final stages of the London Olympics.